sllɐqǝʎǝʎzznɟ

Guess I’ve been taking too long a break from updating my blog. I’ve not been shooting much lately and there are a few rolls of unfinished film in few of my cameras. The Lunar New Year is coming in a few days and hopefully during my stay in Malaysia (to spend the New Year with my folks) I am able to get trigger happy again.

For the last couple of weeks (or months?) … what on earth was I doing if I ain’t busy with my cameras? Apart from the usual duty of entertaining my little boss Fitzand …

I replaced my media player. Replaced my PlayOnHD with a Popcorn Hour C-200. Yeah I know there is a new model C-300 out but I prefer the RF remote and friends were telling me that this older model’s firmware is pretty stable now. The only problem with a RF remote is that I can’t use my universal remote to control the C-200 now. Anyway … the only reason I choose to ‘upgrade’ my player was because I wanted to be able to play my Bluray discs on the player. Yeah I know I can always rip the movies to MKV files but I want to be able to access the full Bluray disc menus. Slapped on a 2TB hard disk and now I’m spending lots of time waiting for my computer to copy the darn large files to the HDD. Oh … I am using the Pavtube BluRay Ripper software and doing a full disc copy. This software is awesome and customer support is superb (yeah … I don’t use pirated copy!). I had some discs hanging during copying and the customer support replied me within 12 hours and gave me an updated version to install … and it is all super okay now. 😀

Some time were ‘invested’ into hacking the Wii console I bought for Fitzand (as a birthday present). What I thought was a difficult processed turned out pretty simple just by following some guides online. I did a soft mod and now he can play his games from a 500GB hard disk instead of having me change the CD each time he decides to try a different game. There are some very cleverly packaged ‘how to’ guides being sold on the internet on how to do these soft mods. Please note that you do not actually have to buy them! The steps and tools needed to do the hack are actually free and can be easily found on the internet.

What else did I do? Hmm … I went ‘hmmm’ when I saw Fujifilm announcing their new premium interchangeble lens X-Pro1. It sure looks sexy like the X-100 & X-10 but somehow I ain’t too tempted by it. Maybe because I still prefer my DSLR (Pentax K5) when it comes to interchangeable lens cameras or have I finally recovered from camera addiction? I sure hope it is the latter. 😛

One pretty tough thing I did (maybe last week) was to settle the problem of spam comments. For some reason, I was receiving hundreds of darn spam comments in my blog every day! They were blocked by the anti spam thingie but I have to clear them (almost daily) from the spam folder. I usually do a quick browse to see if any normal comments got marked as spam but I was worried I might have deleted some by mistake. So what I did was Google for some info on how to prevent/reduce such spam comments and spent about an hour renaming all the WordPress tables in the database. That’s quite a tedious task as I did it manually (instead of using a SQL script) and carefully. One mistake would render my blog dead. 😀 I finally got it done and installed a new anti-spam thingie for the comment box. Now … for the last few days … there are only at most 2 (or none!) spam comments getting into my database. Phew!

Other than these … I’ve been planning to do some DIY ‘facelifts’ to my home but haven’t found the time and energy to get my butt moving. 🙁

That’s just about as boring as it can get … some ‘bigger’ things I did recently. I promise I’ll post some new photos the next time I update my blog.